And here is a list of people that still seem to be actively contributing:

makuta_icarax, The Iron Toa, The Mask of Ice

Come on back, guys! We're actually starting to get somewhere now.

And we have another joyous announcement. It is time to start to split this project into its aspects, which will be worked on over multiple blog updates. First, we have the Races and Subtypes. I have made a detailed post that will get much bigger over time, but I can't do it alone -- read it, and give me your comments and suggestions! Soon, we will have separate posts about the combat system, powers, items, societies -- every part of this project we can think of.

-----

It will be a mostly D&D derived system, but there are some important differences. Here is what we have so far:

Attributes:Strength: Used to determine melee damage, blocking, and how much a character can lift/carry, certain athletic feats like climbingDexterity: Determines dodge/evade (we should pick one term to use), hit chance, ranged damage, certain athletic feats like climbing and acrobaticsToughness: Determines/contributes to values of Vitality (HP) and Endurance, and resistance to physical effects.Charisma: Determines how well characters can get along with and persuade others. Used for lying, persuasion, and intimidation, but also important for friendship and getting you and your allies to work together.Intelligence: Used to determine how quickly/how much you can increase your skills, learn new languages, and how easily your character can figure things out.Will: Determines damage of Powers, aim of Powers, and control over Powers, resistance to mental effects, and how quickly Endurance is lost. That is, a character with higher Will would take less Endurance damage from suffering pain or using powers.

Moral Light - characters that are evil enough can, with the proper training, tap into their inner shadow. There is a very rare ability to see the Moral Light and Shadow in a being to determine if he is good, neutral, or evil.

Destiny: a GM can come up with a Destiny for a character, and is encouraged to bend the rules a little to make characters fulfill their Destinies. A player can tell the GM what he has in mind for his character, but the GM makes the decision, and should keep it a secret in most cases.

Toa Energy: The normal value for this will be -1. There is a small random chance for a Matoran to have 0, which means he has the potential to become a Toa. The player of a Matoran won't necessarily know if this value is -1 or 0. If a Matoran does become a Toa, his Toa Energy is set to 60. This energy can be used to heal others or to transform destined Matoran into Toa. Transforming other Matoran costs 10 Toa energy, so a Toa can transform up to 6 Matoran. When a Toa's value reaches 0 and he has completed his Destiny as a Toa, he becomes a Turaga. If he hasn't completed his Toa Destiny yet, he remains a Toa until he does.

Skills: I think the D&D skill list suits our purposes. Except instead of Spellcraft... I don't know what to call it, but it will be control over innate powers. Use Magic Device would be Use... Powered... Device? We need a better name for that too, but that would be the skill for using Kanohi and other things that aren't part of a character but are mentally activated. Also, we'll want to have some different subcategories of the Craft and Knowledge skills.

I'm starting to understand the D&D combat system but I think I could use some practice. Here's what I understand of how it will work for us:Characters that win an initiate roll or ambush their opponents go first. Attacking characters make a roll (or multiple) to determine their chance to hit and again for damage. All physical attacks need to roll for both, some powers automatically hit but can be resisted, and for some powers instead of rolling for damage you roll for Intensity and Duration. Defending characters, if they can move and it's not an auto-hit attack, can attempt to Dodge or Block it. If they are hit, the damage or chance of affecting them is mitigated by their Resistances. An attack that does Vitality damage or a physical debuff is resisted by a roll based on Toughness and the appropriate resistance type. Endurance damage and mental effects are resisted by Will and the appropriate resistance type. For simplicity, I suggest a certain amount of Vitality damage always does a certain amount of Endurance damage, and how much is based on a character's will. Otherwise, the defender would need to roll twice - once for how much damage it did and again for how much it hurt. Still, this is pretty complicated -- we still need to include how distance affects ranged hit chance. I still need help with this.

I'm sure there's more I missed, so here's the link to the old topic for reference. We should post everything we came up with onto here.

I was thinking our main currency could be gold, not in coins but by weight, just how it backs currency in real life. But we can get to that later. Let's ignore that stuff until we get the game mechanics down.

As for Nova Blasts, I don't think any Nova Blast should automatically kill a Toa (well, maybe a few, like gravity, but I'm not sure). I'm taking my concerns about the amount of EE Toa have to Storyline and Theories.

I think to ensure that the Toa run out of energy, we would just need to make the eventual costs of the energy attacks very large. In other words, it takes lots of effort to properly use elemental power.

So maybe controlling it takes a lot of energy, and Nova Blasts can be so big because it's pure uncontrolled EE? That helps... but I feel like not all the way. I could do some more calculations later and see if I can come up with a good scale of things.

I'm also going to post a new update about stats and character creation soon. Have you read the list of races yet, makuta_icarax, and made any progress on the combat system?

Mask of Ice brought up something I think we need to think about -- what will we use for perception? Like Spot, Listen, Search checks -- do we need a seventh attribute for that, or should they be based on another attribute? Or stand on their own?

I added a new post with the stats we have so far, and how to roll a character. I'll try to come up with a system for skills and traits next. Once we have those and a combat/movement system, we should probably take some time to incorporate everything in a way that's well-balanced.

Yeah. I think automatons like Bohrok should be a special case. They probably should have no Charisma, and be immune to normal mental attacks - I'm not sure if they would even need Will. Krana, however, would have those stats, and I think Krana would have high Will but most would have low Charisma.

We still need to make a rule system, and I haven't worked on it for a long time. If you have any ideas, let me know. D&D stands for Dungeons and Dragons, a famous RPG rule system and collection of thematically linked settings.